The world-famous email column

Issue #38 – “Relative Absurdity” – May 2003

-When I was about a year old, my mom left me home with my dad for the whole day for the very first time. When she came home, she found my dad strangely quiet and me with a devious grin on my fat little face. Upon closer inspection, my mom discovered that I was covered, head to toe, in a thin layer of white powder. She interrogated my dad, who broke pretty easily. After refusing to eat even a morsel of what my dad tried to feed me, I had forced him to give me white powdered donuts for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Thus, even as an infant, I knew my parents’ weaknesses and used them to my advantage. I think that your family life has a huge effect on who you become. That’s why I’d like to take you inside the Karo family – a world of relative absurdity.

-After the powdered donut incident, my young life remained fairly calm until that fateful evening in January 1982 when my parents brought home my newborn sister from the hospital. They carefully unwrapped her blankets, showed me her angelic face, and said, “Aaron, this is your new baby sister, Caryn.” Upon hearing this, I immediately starting running around her crib yelling at the top of my lungs, “Caryn and Aaron! Caryn and Aaron! Caryn and Aaron!” My parents looked at each other in horror. Unwittingly, unknowingly, and inexplicably, they had somehow given their only two children rhyming first names.

-So I had to learn to survive in a family with an Aaron, a Caryn, and a cousin named Sharon. It was harder than you might think. Imagine being ten years old, playing around with your sister in the basement, and all you hear from upstairs is your mom yelling unintelligibly, “…aaaaaaaaryn, come upstairs!” and having no idea whether she’s calling you or your rhyming name sister. To avoid confusion, my parents eventually starting calling us by our middle names. That led to my friends at school noticing that I wouldn’t respond when called Aaron anymore. Since I never told them my middle name, they started calling me Karo. And to this day, everyone I have ever met, from girlfriends to doormen, has always called me Karo (pronounced “KAY-ro”). Except my parents. They still call me and my sister by our middle names. Serves them right.

-So let’s take a closer look at my parents. My mom, an education administrator, is the kind of mom that, no matter where you are in the world, and no matter what is wrong with you, she’s got some shit in her pocketbook that will make it better. “Mom, I skinned my knee.” “Don’t worry honey, I have a band-aid in my purse.” “Mom, I have a headache.” “Don’t worry honey, I have some Advil in my purse.” “Mom, we have a flat tire.” “Don’t worry honey, I have a spare tire in my purse. I also have a tire jack. It’s in the pocket with the zipper, next to the sugarless gum.”

-Of course my mom doesn’t know her own cell phone number. I don’t know why, but moms just don’t know their own cell phone number. They usually have it written on an index card scotch-taped to the back of the phone. My mom also doesn’t leave her cell phone on. She says it’s only for emergencies. Well how am I supposed to reach you in an emergency if your phone is off and stashed in that giant pocketbook of yours? And dads are just the opposite. Dads pick up their cell phone no matter what. My dad will be like, “Hey son, I’m in the middle of open heart surgery but I saw you on caller ID and just wanted to make sure everything was OK.” Which is weird, because my dad’s not even a doctor.

-My dad, who is a toy company executive by weekday and a golf-playing, golf magazine-reading, golf on TV-watching, golf school-attending fanatic on the weekends, always taught me about the important things in life. My senior year in high school, my dad attended parent-teacher conferences. When he met with my biology teacher, he noticed pictures on the wall of everyone in the class at a field trip we had taken a few weeks earlier. Pictures of everyone except for me. When he came home, he told me we had to talk. I was scared out of my mind. He asked me why I missed the school field trip. I said to him, “Dad, I have to level with you. I cut school that day and took the train to the city to watch the Yankees World Series victory parade.” I’ll never forget his response. “Son,” he said, “This is the proudest moment of my life.”

-My sister Caryn, a rising senior at Dartmouth, has suffered from the classic second-child disadvantages. While shelves full of albums and scrapbooks document my early years (including a pouch with some hair from my first haircut), my sister’s history was relegated to a couple of Polaroids and an old coloring book. Despite this checkered past, my sister will forever remain the Good One in the family. Though we have both been very successful in our lives, Caryn is sweet, caring, and interested in helping others, whereas I am loud, obnoxious, and selfish. I just can’t win.

-Quote of the Month. This is an old classic. My parents always taught Caryn and I to challenge ourselves and others. One day in high school, a particularly vociferous and overbearing social studies teacher was lecturing on and on to a class full of demoralized students. The topic was a foreign country, the teacher boldly proclaimed, that was “more than halfway around the world.” After a few more minutes of this, my sister calmly raised her hand and said, “But there’s no such thing as more than halfway around the world. If you have to go more than halfway around the world to get there, you might as well just go the other way.” For a moment, everyone was stunned. My sister had spoken out of turn. But then the teacher and everyone else had to admit it – she’s right.

-I am very lucky to have two grandmas who live in the same old-age home in my hometown on Long Island. Grandma Babe is 88. Her hearing is great but she has little idea about what the hell is going on. Grandma Zelda is 92. Her memory is great but she can’t hear shit. So one grandma forgets to take her memory pills and the other can’t understand us when we tell her to turn up her hearing aid. But as long as they remember to give me money and hear me when I say thank you, I’ll love them just the same.

-I’m happy that my grandmas are in this home. Not only do they get treated very well, but they’re also close enough to visit regularly. OK, I’ll be honest, the reason I’m happy they’re in this home is because now I don’t have to eat from that candy dish anymore. You know that candy dish that your grandparents have in their house that has had the same wrapped candy in it for like twenty-five years? And by now all the candies that are left are yellow because no one likes the lemon ones? Good riddance!

-I have more cousins than I know what to do with. Old cousins, baby cousins, California cousins, Florida cousins. One of my cousins I refer to as an SUC – sports utility cousin. SUCs are the cousins that offer to do just about anything you can think of – beat someone up, pick you up at the airport, build a wall unit. And of course, the SUC always drives a giant SUV.

-My dad loves the duty-free shop. There’s just something about duty that gets him all worked up. On every family vacation we took when we were little kids, all I remember is filling up Caryn’s stroller with half-price bottles of Absolut.

-Whenever we go on vacation, my mom gets one “nature day” where we have to see some lame-ass park or stream. We once went to the Grand Canyon for a week and that put us in the clear for a decade.

-I’m twenty-three years old. But whenever I fly anywhere, I have to send my parents an itinerary with flight numbers and times. And I call them as soon as I land. Even stopovers.

-When I was in high school, I used to borrow the car and blast loud music. My parents would get pissed when they got in the car and the volume was turned all the way up. Ironically, now that I’ve toned down a bit on the loud music and my parents are starting to lose their hearing, we both listen at the exact same volume.

-Ever notice that dads carry more in their pockets than any humans on earth? My dad turns a pair of khaki shorts into an overnight bag.

-My mom has almost superhero-like powers. You tell her what time a movie is playing, how long it’s been out for, and how many stars it got, and she’ll tell you to the minute when you have to leave the house in order to get to the theater before it sells out. Then she’ll come with you and make you sit through the entire credits at the end because she wants “to see who that guy with the shirt was.”

-Like any superhero, my mom has weaknesses. Her kryptonite is cameras. She’s had the same one for five years and still can’t work it. Last fall we went to Scotland to visit my sister who was studying abroad. My dad played St. Andrew’s, the oldest golf course in the world, in the middle of a monsoon. When he stepped back into the clubhouse he was soaked to the bone and carrying his clubs with tears in his eyes. My mom was ready for this once-in-a-lifetime shot…and couldn’t figure out to work the flash. Thankfully, I was prepared for such a scenario and snapped the picture with a disposable. And that’s what family is all about.

-As you can see, the Karo family is quirky and crazy, but full of love. Everything I’ve accomplished I owe to them. In fact, my sister and mom proofread this column every month before I send it out. Seeing the way my grandparents, parents, and cousins have raised their children has convinced me that I want kids of my own. I’ve even decided that if my first-born child is a son, like I was, I would like to name him Adam. Why? Because nothing rhymes with Adam.

-As always, here are some random things I’ve been ruminating about lately…

-Why do I have a laptop when I have never once moved the thing from my desk?

-Have you noticed that they are getting a lot more lenient with what you can get away with on TV these days? They let a lot more dirty words go by than they used to. And I turned on MTV the other night at like 3am and I swear I saw a titty.

-Ever hit the horn in your car by accident and then have to mime to the person in front you that you didn’t mean to? You put your hand in the air like “my bad” and other person thinks you’re saying, “Fuck you.”

-I’m that guy that doesn’t pull up close enough to the automatic ticket dispenser at tollbooths and parking garages and has to unbuckle his seat belt and lunge out of the car window to reach the ticket. My mom is that woman that doesn’t pull up close enough either but she’s small so she has to physically open the car door and get halfway out in order to reach the ticket. It runs in the family I guess.

-I’m also that guy who in high school would come back from winter break and forget my locker combination so the janitor would have to come with the jaws of life and cut open my lock. Every single year.

-Since I get tons of email every week, I have become pretty adept at quickly discerning the purpose of an email. I have found that any email that starts with the word “listen” is always going to be bad: “Listen, I don’t think this is working out.” “Listen, I didn’t know he was your best friend.” “Listen, I have some kind of rash.” Listen, I think I’m going to delete this email right now!

-Along with the rest of the nation, I am fucking psyched to see the new Matrix movie. (Though I will say, people, it’s time to get rid of your Matrix screensavers.) Anyway, I will tell you this much, if I was Neo, and Morpheus gave me the same choice he gave him, I’d be like, “Yeah, um, I’m gonna have to go with the blue pill on this one. Red pills kinda give me heartburn you know? Plus Punk’d is on in like ten minutes and I wanna get home. Yeah, thanks. Do I take this with water? Great. See ya!”

-Is it weird that when I’m introduced to two people who are going out, the first thing I do is imagine them fucking?

-Why do all punk rock albums have like sixteen tracks but the whole CD is only twenty-two minutes long?

-I’m sick of hearing about “my friend’s band.” It seems like every weekend someone is saying to me, “Hey, I’m going to see my friend’s band, you should come, they’re really good!” And they’re always playing in some out of the way shithole and the only people that like them are…their friends.

-The next time I’m in an elevator that keeps making stops and someone jokes, “Hey, must be the local!” I’m gonna punch them in the neck.

-I hate when I ask people at a bar where they’re from and they launch into this whole spiel about how they’re not really sure where they’re from because their family moved around a lot and they went to elementary school here but high school there but now in the summer they live here and… I’m like, dude, just say Philadelphia or something, because I don’t really care.

-Summer has arrived in New York City – time to put away those Burberry scarves and dig out those Abercrombie shorts! In a few weeks, the NYU dorms will be emptied of their usual nose ring-clad residents and be filled with investment banking interns from Penn. The usual summer hotspots, Bowery Bar, Luna Park, and Lemon Bar will be packed from happy hour to closing. Hell, this fucking fondue place down the block from me is so crowded I can barely walk by – and it’s a fondue place. The guys will start ordering beers that come with a slice of lemon and the girls, well the girls, wait, is it me…or did all the girls just get really hot all of a sudden?

-I’m even more psyched for the summer because the city’s ban on smoking in bars and restaurants officially went into effect about a month ago. Of course, a few weeks into the ban, a bouncer threw a bunch of guys out of a bar for smoking illegally and they promptly stabbed the bouncer to death. While obviously an extreme example, this just goes to show the stupidity and arrogance of New York’s smoking population. Get the hint smokers, no one likes you!

-Meanwhile, on the East Side, a crisis was narrowly averted when the largest doorman union in the city struck a last minute deal after having threatened to strike. Thank God too, as chaos surely would have reigned in the streets with no one to accept deliveries, hold elevators, or carry Marc Jacobs shopping bags for the denizens of Third Avenue. A friend of mine was especially worried about the impending doorman strike. I was like, are you kidding me, your apartment has automatic doors!

-I love how people not from New York can’t comprehend how loud it is here. Whenever my agent calls me from Los Angeles and I’m outside, he’s always like, “Karo, where are you man, the core of the earth?” I’m like, dude, relax, I’m at this fondue place and a fire truck just went by.

-I think I’m giving up on going to the gym. Why? Because Madonna is 44, has two kids, and has better triceps than I’ll ever have in my entire life.

-When you’re out with a chick you’ve been hooking up with, the question “How do you two know each other?” is always so awkward. You both look at each other and giggle and stammer and make up some story about how her roommate knows your fraternity brother even though what really happened was that you were really drunk at 4am at Bowery Bar a few weeks ago and convinced her to come back to your place. But we can’t just say that, now can we?

-You know what I’ve noticed about this time of year? Everyone blames everything on allergies. “My nose is all stuffed up.” “Must be allergies.” “My eyes are watering.” “You probably have allergies.” “I broke my leg.” “Wow, you have bad allergies.” “The stock market is down.” “Well, it is allergy season.”

-Why do tracking numbers and confirmation numbers have to be all crazy? I just ordered something online and the confirmation number was like 5802K23-C96S-07DSA. Why can’t it just be 53B?

-Do you have friends that are e-card whores? My friend Jen sends me an e-card for every single occasion – my birthday, Valentine’s Day, President’s Day, the autumnal equinox. It’s wonderful because I know that she really cares. But I’m sort of frightened by the fact that she’s able to find so many different cards that feature singing bears holding balloons.

-I don’t get it when restaurants and take-out menus have soups and other entrees listed that say they are “homemade.” Uh…what? Do you live in the restaurant or something?

-I really don’t understand this show “Fraternity Life” on MTV. What kind of fraternity would allow a camera crew to follow them around for a semester? You certainly can’t do most of the things that fraternities are supposed to do if you’re on camera all the time. Back in my day, if they followed my fraternity around with a video camera, the show would not be called “Fraternity Life,” it’d be called “How to Lose a House in Ten Days.”

-Why do all girls’ bath products smells like some sort of berry? I took a shower at a friend’s place last week and when I was done I smelled so delicious I wanted to eat myself.

-And, finally, another tale of my inability to function properly in society. My sister was visiting me in the city a few weeks ago and we were walking down the street. When we got to a corner, my phone rang, and a person I really didn’t want to talk to popped up on caller ID. I immediately hit the “ignore” button on my phone and sent it straight to voicemail. I started telling my sister this funny story about this guy and I was making all kinds of faces and gestures and generally making fun of the kid. A few blocks later, I checked my voicemail. The message: “Karo, I called you because I was standing behind you on the street. Asshole.” Fuck me.